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On Natural Selection

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economy, fidelity, patriotism, which they were forbidden to exercise in public, where their only function was, to nail up the hand of the weather-glass, in order to insure fine weather; as they are doing to this day in every telegram. So he is justly punished, and God's judgments are, as always, righteous and true. . .

September 5. "Since Waterloo, there has been no such event in Europe. I await with awe and pity the Parisian news of the next few days. As for the Emperor, while others were bowing down to him, I never shrank from expressing my utter contempt of him. His policy is now judged, and he with it, by fact, which is the ' voice of God revealed in things,' as Bacon says; and I at least, instead of joining the crowd of curs who worry where they lately fawned, shall never more say a harsh word against him. Let the condemned die in peace if possible, and he will not, I hear, live many monthsperhaps not many days. Why should he wish to live? This very surrender may be the not undignified farewell to life of one who knows himself at his last."

TO ALFRED WALLACE, ESQ., F.L.S.

"October 22, 1870.- I have read your 'Essay on Natural Selection' with equal delight and profit. The facts, of course, are true, as all yours are sure to be; but I have never been able to get rid of the belief, that every grain of sand washed down by a river - by the merest natural laws is designedly put in the exact place where it will be needed some time or other; or that the ugliest beast (though I confess the puzzle here is stranger), and the most devilish, has been created because it is beautiful and useful to some being or other. In fact, I believe not only in 'special providences,' but in the whole universe as one infinite complexity of special providences. I only ask you to extend to all

nature the truth you have so gallantly asserted for man -That the laws of organic development have been occasionally used for a special end, just as man uses them for his special ends.' Page 370. Omit 'occasionally,' and say 'always,' and you will complete your book and its use. In any case, it will be a contribution equally to science and to natural theology."

CHAPTER XXV

1871

AGED 52

LECTURE AT SION COLLEGE-CorreSPONDENCE-IDEAL FEUDALISM- -SCIENTIFIC AGRICULTURE WORDS OF CONDOLENCE-EXPEDITIONS OF THE CHESTER NATURAL SCIENCE SOCIETY-LECTURES ON TOWN GEOLOGY-A LUMP OF THE RACE WEEK AT CHESTER · · LETTERS ON - CAMP AT BRAMSHILL PRINCE OF WALES'S SERMON ON LOYALTY AND SANITARY SCIENCE - LECTURES at Bideford, WOOLWICH, AND WINCHESTER.

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"To conclude, therefore, let no man, out of a weak conceit of sobriety, or an ill-applied moderation, think or maintain that a man can search too far, or be too well studied in the book of God's word, or in the book of God's works, divinity or philosophy, but rather let men endeavor at endless progress or proficience in both."

BACON, ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING.

"Who art thou that complainest of thy life of toil? Complain not! Look up, my wearied brother. To thee Heaven, though severe, is not unkind. Heaven is kind, as a noble mother, as that Spartan mother, saying when she gave her son his shield,' With it, my son, or upon it!' Thou, too, shalt return home in honor. Doubt it not, if in the battle thou keep thy shield."

CARLYLE.

N January he gave a lecture on "The Theology of the Future,"1 at Sion College; which made a profound impression, and brought hope and comfort to many. In it he asserted his own belief in final causes, and urged on the clergy

1 This lecture, or rather part of it, is incorporated into the preface of his "Westminster Sermons," published in 1874.

VOL. II.-19

the necessity of facing the scientific facts of the day, and accepting the great work of reconciling science and the creeds.

"I wish to speak," he says, "not on natural religion, but on natural theology. By the first I understand what can be learnt from the physical universe of man's duty to God and his neighbor; by the latter I understand what can be learned concerning God Himself. Of natural religion I shall say nothing. I do not even affirm that a natural religion is possible; but I do very earnestly believe that a natural theology is possible; and I earnestly believe also that it is most important that natural theology should, in every age, keep pace with doctrinal or ecclesiastical theology.

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He goes on to speak of Bishop Butler, Berkeley, and Paley, as three of our greatest natural theologians, and of the important fact, that the clergy of the Church of England, since the foundation of the Royal Society in the seventeenth century, have done more for sound physical science than the clergy of any other denomination; and expresses his conviction that if our orthodox thinkers for the last hundred years had followed steadily in the same steps, we should not now be deploring the wide and, as some think, widening gulf between science and Christianity. He very strongly recommends to the younger clergy "Herder's Outlines of the Philosophy of the History of Man" as a book, in spite of certain defects, full of sound and precious wisdom. presses the study of Darwin's Fertilization of Orchids (whether his main theory be true or not) as a most valuable addition to natural theology. He speaks of certain popular hymns of the present

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Lecture at Sion College

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day as proofs of an unhealthy view of the natural world, with a savor hanging about them of the old monastic theory of the earth being the devil's planet instead of God's, giving characteristic instances, and contrasting their keynote with that of the 104th, 147th, and 148th Psalms, and the noble Benedicite Omnia Opera of our Prayerbook. He contrasts the Scriptural doctrine about the earth being cursed with the popular fancies on the same point. He speaks of the 139th Psalm as a "marvellous essay on natural theology," and of its pointing to the important study of embryology, which is now occupying the attention of Owen, Huxley, and Darwin. Then he goes on to "Race," and "the painful and tremendous facts" which it involves, which must all be faced; believing that here, too, Science and Scripture will not ultimately be found at variance. Then, after an eloquent protest against the "child-dream of a dead universe governed by an absent God," which Carlyle and even Goethe have "treated with noble scorn,' he speaks of that "nameless, invisible, imponderable, yet seeming omnipresent thing which scientific men are finding below all phenomena which the scalpel and the microscope can show "the life which shapes and makes that "unknown and truly miraculous element in nature, the mystery of which forever engrossing, as it does, the noblest minded of our students of science, is yet forever escaping them while they cannot escape it." He calls on the clergy to have courage to tell them - what will sanctify, while it need never hamper, their investigations that this perpetual and omnipresent miracle is no other than the Breath

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